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Erica is halfway up the wall when the shaking starts. She not seizing—oh, trust her, she knows that feeling and she is damn sure this isn’t it—but something is totally wrong. Her arms feel really weak and her head is spinning and way, way too late she remembers that her meds have dizziness as a side effect of cardiovascular exertion. Fuck. Oh, fuck, she’s going to fall.
The harder she clings to the wall the more she shakes. A tendon in her arm starts spasming. She’s gasping, freaking the fuck out about a stupid climbing wall in stupid fucking gym class, and if they haven’t noticed yet they’re all going to soon and she knows exactly what they’re going to say—
“Hey, are you okay?”
Yeah, great, thanks Concerned Citizen. That’s how it always starts.
Except this person doesn’t seem to be part of the gawping crowd below. This person is, in fact, right next to her, and if Erica could look away from the plastic handhold two inches in front of her blurring eyes she would relish the chance to tell them to fuck off at close range.
And then there’s a hand on her back. There’s a hand holding her to the wall with really surprising strength considering she was climbing with that new girl who looks pretty fragile, really, but Erica doesn’t care because she’s not going to fall.
“You’re epileptic, right? Are you going to have a seizure?” It’s the question Erica hates the most, but at least this girl had to courtesy to ask softly.
“No,” she gets out. She hates how weak and watery her voice sounds. “Just dizzy.” Just a complete and utter loser.
“Which sounds easier: letting go completely, or climbing down?”
Well if I let go completely I can punch you in the face for talking to me like I’m three years old. She doesn’t say it. The girl’s hand is, at this point, the only thing holding her on the wall.
“Hey, what’s going on up there?” Oh, great, Coach Dickwad has finally decided to pay attention to the teenagers he’s got suspended in mid-air. And here it comes, now everyone is going to stare, and it’ll only take one of these geniuses a minute to realize that this is an opportunity for a great follow-up video...
“I’m not feeling good,” the girl yells down, and Erica is so surprised she lets go of the wall. The rope and the girl’s arm catch her like it isn’t even a big deal. “Can we just come down?”
“Allison, are you okay?” That’s Scott McCall. Erica used to have some fellow feeling with him because he’d get asthma attacks in gym, but apparently he grew out of that this year or something so now she just absently envies him. Nice kid, though. Never laughs at her.
“Just feel a little sick. Erica, is it okay if we stop?” Erica finally manages to wrench her eyes away from the wall in front of her. Allison looks like one of those effortlessly sporty assholes Erica hates, with her hair up and her smile small and conspiratory. The compassion burns. Erica’s gratitude burns worse.
“I guess so, sure.” She rubs a hand across her face to get rid of any stray tears and then slowly presses the lever on her harness. It gets her down to the ground in jerky fits and starts, and she only stumbles a little when her feet hit. No one pays any attention to her, because Scott McCall is fussing over Allison like she’s about to give birth to his baby right there on the gym mats. Erica never thought she’d be grateful for nauseating couples, but she so is.
And, now that she’s down on the ground and not freaking out, she admits that she’s grateful Allison was the one up there on the wall with her, too.
Erica doesn’t think much about Allison Argent again for a while after that, mostly because the doctors up her dosage and she hits another period of intense nausea. She doesn’t puke in the lunch room this time, but there are a couple of close calls and people start saying she’s bulimic. And that it’s about time, because she could stand to lose the weight.
Erica hates high school, and humanity, and the rolls of fat she can feel when she pinches her waist. She hates gym class and clothes shopping and people who have dates on Saturday and hospitals and parents and waking up in the middle of the night choking on the taste of rust and gore.
Erica is so deeply, powerfully bitter that she’s actually a little surprised that when she hears that Lydia Martin freaked out in the middle of math class, her first reaction is pity, not triumph. But then, cruelty to those fallen from grace is only for thin, pretty girls with clear skin. Erica has discovered in the past couple years that people look at her tangled hair and baggy, shapeless clothes and the way she tucks her chin down (extra chin fat layer vs having to look people in the eyes, the constant weighing of cons that is her life), and they assume she’s nice. Ugly girls have to be nice, because what else is there for them?
Erica isn’t nice. And she hates Lydia Martin, because it’s so obvious how much she loves being pretty enough to be mean.
So when Erica gets through the first initial rush of empathy (they stared, and they laughed, and god does she know how that feels), she sets out to be really damn satisfied about the fact that Lydia is now the school freak.
Except Lydia disappears from school for a whole month. That’s longer than Erica has ever missed because of her epilepsy. And the very first day Lydia comes back, when she walks into the front doors of the school and faces everyone’s stares, Allison Argent is at her shoulder. She walks with her, to and from every class, even when it makes her late for her own. And she sits with her at lunch and stares at everyone with a face that is pale and severe, the skin stretched so tightly over her flesh that her cheekbones look like weapons. It hits Erica like a torpedo, the fight she sees inside Allison welling up through her eyes. She didn’t look like that last time Erica saw her. Erica knows about feeling rage inside struggling to get out, struggling so hard it feels like it’s warping the limits of your body, twisting you into the shape of its trapped fury. That’s how Allison looks.
Why does sporty, pretty, sweet Allison Argent look like that? Why is she so deeply, chillingly frightening that everyone avoids so much as looking at Lydia’s defiantly raised head?
According to the internet, which Erica is unashamedly stalking Allison on after school, it’s probably because of her aunt. Losing family sucks, definitely: Erica’s abuela died a couple of years ago, and it really tore her up. But her abuela never killed a whole house full of people and got away with it for eight years. Fucking hell Kate Argent, Erica is almost impressed at the sheer level of crazy communicated in these news reports.
So Allison’s aunt was terrifying, and now Allison looks pretty damn scary herself. And Lydia was perfect, and now she’s something no one can quite figure out.
They’re interesting. They’re weird, and Erica likes weird (as her freshman year humiliatingly invisible crush on Stiles Stilinksi will attest). Erica knows that she doesn’t get a place in the normal world, but maybe if she takes a chance right now, she could make a space for herself in Allison and Lydia’s weirdness. Compared to what people on Facebook are saying about Allison and Lydia, what they say about Erica looks like gentle teasing. She’s not pretty like they are, but she’s also not as dumb or meek as she pretends. She has enough left in her for one more push, one more try for something better than the shit that her life is right now, and Erica thinks this might be it.
She gets her chance during Chemistry class. She set herself up for success as best she could: grabbed the lab table right next to Allison and Lydia, finished her lab super early so she could listen in on their conversation. And it pays off, because she sees Mark Edmount giggling and nudging his friends and then sneaking forward, reaching over to their test tube to try to put something in.
Erica trips him. She gets a good windup with her foot, too, and swings it back into his legs hard enough that he doesn’t just stumble, he does a full-on pratfall onto the tile floor. It makes a really satisfying crash, his phone flies out of his pocket and the battery skitters under a bench, and everyone in the room jumps and then starts laughing. Someone cues up a trombone noise on their phone, ‘wah-wah-WAH’. Erica laughs, too, and holds Lydia’s eyes when she glances at her. Yeah, that was me. Notice me now? she tries to communicate with her gaze.
It must work, because they’re waiting for her outside the door after class.
“What exactly was that about?” Lydia demands, with that funny intonation she does so it sounds like ‘what ex-ACT-ly was thAT’. She’s so over-the-top, sometimes Erica thinks that her true calling is as a B-movie supervillain.
“I felt like seeing him fall,” she says. Lydia’s eyes narrow; Allison is looking at her steadily, consideringly. Erica shrugs and goes for broke. “And I didn’t feel like seeing whatever he was going to do to mess up your experiment.”
“Sweetheart if you think we can’t take care of ourselves,” Lydia starts, then blinks and stops when Allison wraps a hand around her wrist.
“What do you want.” Allison phrases it like an interrogation, not a question. She doesn’t have that same ‘ten seconds from murder’ look on her face she did in the cafeteria that day, but there’s the potential for it, lurking in the dark sweep of her eyelashes. Erica likes it.
“I want to sit with you at lunch,” she says. She tries to make her voice as strong as Allison’s, not pleading or wheedling but demanding. She thinks it works, from the way Allison blinks, taken aback. Lydia sneers.
“Uh, we’re not running a loser outreach program.”
“Hard to do when you’re the new losers.” Lydia bristles immediately. Erica meets her gaze too, tries to be just as sharp, just as vicious. She knows vicious. Just because she doesn’t let it out to play much doesn’t mean her inner voice doesn’t have fangs. “You think you’re any less of a target than I am? Think again. Today Mark had a choice who to harass, me or you, and he chose you. Sweetheart.”
“Did you ask him to?” That question came out of left field. Erica shivers a little; the murder in Allison’s gaze is back, full force. “Did you put him up to it so you could save us?”
“Hell no. I don’t think I’ve ever said two words to him that weren’t “stop” or “ow.””
“Hm.” Allison nods, sharply. “I’m okay with you sitting with us.”
“Allison!” Lydia protests.
“What? Come on, Lyds, don’t be a snob. It’s not like we have anyone else taking up space at our table, what with…you know…. Jackson and all.” Lydia flinches. Erica realizes, to her own surprise, that she doesn’t like seeing that shaky look on Lydia’s face.
“Whittemore? Fuck him. That sneer he does looks like he’s constantly about to sneeze,” Erica says, forcedly casual, and Lydia actually laughs.
“Yeah, it does doesn’t it. You know what? Fine. Welcome to the freakshow, Reyes.”
This might be the best moment of Erica’s life.
By lunch time Erica has moved from elated to freaking out. She realized some time during third period that she has no idea how to sit with people at lunch, no idea how to interact with Allison Argent and freaking Lydia Martin, and no idea how to try to convince them to keep her around when they rocket back up to the top of the school again.
Because the thing is, she knows it’s going to happen. They can’t remain pariahs for long: Lydia’s too rich, Allison’s too nice, and they’re both too hot. The natural motion of the sea of refuse that is high school will bob them back up to the top, and they are going to be Erica’s life preservers if she has to die trying.
By lunch time she’s feeling like dying trying is a very real possibility. She buys her lunch on autopilot, and then the moment is upon her. It’s pathetic, how the daily humiliation of scanning the cafeteria looking for a seat and having no one to sit with tears at her. She feels the same swooping anxiety and shame every time, and she knows no one is looking at her but she feels like everyone is staring at her every damn time she does this.
Erica takes a steadying breath, clutching her lunchtray, and very deliberately seeks out Lydia and Allison at their otherwise empty table. She tries to meet Allison’s eyes first, because she actually seems cool, but unfortunately Lydia’s the one who spots her. She gives her a sweeping up-and-down look that seems to see not just Erica’s white-knuckled hands and untied shoelace but also every stupid or awkward thing she’s ever done in her life. There’s a pause in which Erica stops breathing. Then Lydia raises one hand and elegantly, casually waves. Erica, relief rushing so hard in her veins she feels dizzy, walks over.
“Saved you a seat, babe.” Lydia indicates the utterly empty table with saccharine irony.
“That’s so sweet,” Erica bites back, and sits.
“Hey, what are girlfriends for.”
“Slow down, baby, buy me dinner first.”
“Oh my god!” Allison, who was drinking a soda and watching the exchange warily, sputters and almost snorts her drink up her nose. “Ahahaha! Oh my god!” Erica can’t help but laugh too at her efforts to both giggle helplessly and avoid spewing Coke everywhere, and then Lydia joins in. Erica thinks people might be staring. For the first time in her memory, she’s glad.
“So, apparently I have friends now or something,” she tells Derek, her personal trainer, after school. Incredibly, Erica’s insurance will not pay for some of her more experimental medication regimens, but it will pay for two Pilates-sort-of sessions a month because obesity is an epidemic. Clearly her BMI is her most dangerous health condition.
“Good for you,” he says disinterestedly. Erica likes Derek, not least because he responded to her trying to kiss him with a flat ‘you’re underage, fuck off’ and then never mentioned it again.
“They’re hotter than you.”
“That’s the weirdest attempt at an insult I’ve heard this week.”
“Shut up.”
“You shut up.”
“You shut up more.”
“I’m not engaging with this,” Derek announces, way too late to be the mature one. “We have one more set; music?”
“Sure. Or I’ll just watch your ass in front of me, that’d be good too.” Erica gives him what she likes to pretend is a dazzling smile, but she knows is wobbly and probably lopsided. She wishes she could smirk and preen like fucking Lydia Martin.
“This is a hostile work environment,” Derek grumbles, doing that eye thing that means he’s actually smiling while frowning. “Okay, lunges, nice and slow and don’t push yourself on the way up. Knees over toes, keep your core engaged. Boyd, can you put the music back on?”
“Only because I was already over here!” Boyd calls, hefting several yoga mats with one arm and swiping at the phone that the workout playlist is on with his other hand. A second later “Call Me Maybe” starts blaring from the speakers; Derek sighs and Boyd shoots him a broad, asshole grin.
Erica thinks Boyd and Derek might be banging. ‘Hopes’ might be the more appropriate word, because that would be smoking hot.
“My little boy is all grown up,” she tells Derek mistily as she lowers her knee slowly towards the floor.
“What the fuck,” he says, resignedly, and drops into an annoyingly perfect lunge.
Over the next week, Erica cements her position at Lydia and Allison’s table and learns the following facts: Jackson Whittemore a.k.a. The Ex is to be mocked when possible and ignored when not. Scott McCall a.k.a. The Other Ex is never to be mocked and is to be nodded awkwardly at in the halls. It’s no use asking Lydia for the answers in math or Chem because she doesn’t answer in English, just spews Smart Person Babble at you until you crumple before her. Allison gets scrunchy-cheeked and bashfully smiley when complimented, which is so cute Erica might actually have a heart attack. Lydia has an encyclopedic knowledge of subjects as disparate as chaos theory and Cosmo, and will lecture on them interchangeably.
The last thing she learns is that Allison is like a striking cobra when you piss her off, and she learns that in the hallway on the way from PreCalc to US History.
“Sure I’d still do Martin. Crazy chicks are supposed to be the best—” Erica hears, and she turns, mouth open and teeth bared, but Allison…
Allison moves faster. That’s not accurate. Allison moves too fast to see.
“Say ‘crazy’ one more time.”
She has a knife. Erica can see it in her hand, it’s pressed right up against Alec “Likes to shove into Erica with his shoulder in the hallways” Barton’s ribs. He’s staring at it too, his eyes huge. Allison shoves at him a little harder with her other arm, the one pressed almost against his windpipe.
“Do it. I dare you.”
He looks like he considers it, for just a second. Then he looks into her face, goes even paler than before, and shakes his head.
“Yeah. Good call.”
She doesn’t take the knife away just yet. Erica slowly inches around until she can see Allison’s face. Because she wants to, she knows she’s supposed think violence is wrong but honestly what she thinks is that this is the hottest thing she’s ever seen in her life and she’s three seconds from having to press her thighs together and squirm. Allison’s eyes are cold and direct and so sharp they look ready to draw blood.
“You’re thinking about what you’re going to tell everyone about this later, I can tell. Go ahead. Homicidal knife chick seems like the kind of phrasing you’ll go with, and honestly I don’t care. You can talk about me all you want. But if you say one more word about her? One more word is all it’ll take. I’ll find out.”
Slowly, she slides the knife away from him and back into her pocket. Erica can’t even see its outline once it’s replaced.
“Come on Erica, let’s go.”
“Sure.” Allison turns on her heel and Erica moves to follow. She feels eyes on her neck, then, and stops. Alec’s buddy Devon, who saw the whole thing, is staring at her and he doesn’t look nearly as cowed. Erica doesn’t have a knife, but she’s not sure she needs one. She kicks Devon, hard, right above his knee the way Derek taught her.
“Ow!” he yells, and bangs back into the lockers as the leg crumples.
“Oops. Crazy chick here, you know how we get, my bad! Hey, if I’d been a little higher I might have gotten your junk. Imagine how much that would have sucked!”
Was that threat explicit enough? Was it too on the nose? Gawd, Erica needs to take lessons from Allison in threatening people, it’s apparently not as intuitive as it seems?
Devon stares at her. The fascinated, almost delighted look on his face is gone at least. That’ll have to do.
“Toodles!” she says, channeling Elle Woods with all her might, and follows Allison down the hall. Once they round the corner she sneaks a look at Allison’s face through her hair, in case Allison is mad that Erica stole her badass routine.
Allison is smiling. Not her sunshine smile, but not the scary knife one either. Erica doesn’t quite know how to classify this one.
“Lydia and I are having a sleepover on Saturday. Want to come?” she asks.
“Oh. Uh, sure?” Erica hopes the ‘are you sure you want to invite me?’ isn’t too obvious on her face.
“Cool. I can pick you up if you give me your address.” Damn, she drives too? Is there nothing Allison Argent can’t do?
Saturday night finds Erica in Lydia’s room staring in some alarm at the absolute sea of clothes spread everywhere.
“Oh good, you’re here. Do I want swishy or slinky?” Lydia says by way of greeting.
“For…?”
“My birthday!” Lydia looks at Erica as if that should have been obvious. “We are so totally over high school parties,” out of the corner of Erica’s eyes she sees Allison’s mouth twist, and reads between the lines: ‘we no longer get invited to high school parties’, “so we’re gonna drive into the city and hit the clubs.”
“We’d invite you but…flashing lights?” Erica is kind of surprised that Allison thought that far ahead about her epilepsy. Even if she’s wrong.
“Actually I’m not photosensitive. I probably still can’t, though; my parents would never let me go to a club. Thanks, though.”
“You sure? We’re going to the under-18 one,” Allison offers. Lydia pouts.
“Because Angel Allie over here doesn’t have a fake ID.”
“Oh my god dorkiest nickname.”
“Yeah that one isn’t sticking if I have anything to say about it.”
“You don’t. Now shut up and help me pick out a dress,” Lydia orders with a toss of her hair.
“Yes Your Highness.” Erica starts sifting through the clothes piles. She has no idea what she’s looking for, and ends up mostly fishing out things she thinks are pretty and wishes she owned for herself. Which is apparently what Allison is doing too, because less than five minutes later she holds up a skirt.
“Okay if I try this on?”
“Go ahead, mirrors are in the walk-in closet,” Lydia instructs lazily. Of course there’s a walk-in closet. Of course. “Erica, feel free, though you’re way too tall for any of my pants.”
Erica tactfully does not respond that actually Lydia is just short. Allison comes out of the closet with a sashay to show off a swirly blue skirt that she wants Lydia’s opinion on, and Erica ducks inside and starts trying to see if any of Lydia’s skirts might fit her.
She is just sliding a cute-but-too-small leopard-print skirt off her hips with some difficulty when she hears the closet door open behind her.
“Oh my god what?” Lydia says in tones of deep betrayal. “Erica where the hell were you hiding that ass?!”
“Uh.” That’s…a weird question. “In…my pants? Like…most people…do?”
“Most people do not have this butt.”
Erica shrieks and slaps behind her when she feels a hand on her ass, and cranes over her shoulder to give Lydia an incredulous look.
“Is this, like, a girl bonding thing now or something? Ass-grabbing?”
“If you want it to be, baby,” Lydia purrs, doing her come-on-to-me face. Erica sticks her tongue out and hopes her ears aren’t pink.
“You’re not ready for this jelly.”
“No, I really wasn’t. Hey, actually, shirt off too?”
Erica considers it for a minute. On one hand, ugh, perfect Lydia Martin with her 0% body fat seeing Erica’s chunky belly. On the other, she kind of does want to try on some of those shirts, so it has to come off eventually. And Lydia hasn’t been a bitch about it so far.
“Don’t laugh,” she says, more honest than she wanted it to be, and tugs her shirt over her head.
Lydia doesn’t laugh, which is all Erica can really process for a moment. Instead she gives her a once-over, her eyes kind of wide, and then says flatly:
“You’re wearing the wrong bra size.”
“So the internet tells me. Like it really matters?” Erica expected to feel ugly, to be even more over-conscious of her tummy rolls and stretch marks in her underwear with Lydia looking at her. Weirdly, she doesn’t feel any of that. Lydia is so casual about Erica’s near-nudity that it’s making her feel casual about it too, with a little delicious edge of naughty to it. She doesn’t even mind that Allison has come to the door to investigate and is looking too.
“Babe, it matters.”
“Whatever. No one’s going to be looking at them, or at least no one worthwhile.” Of course the minute Erica says that Lydia and Allison both look right at her boobs. Erica bites her lip a tiny bit and tries not to think about how very worthwhile Lydia Martin and Allison Argent are. She feels the conflicting urges to either cover up and hide, or straighten her shoulders and try to flaunt.
“What makes you so sure?”
“Don’t. Come on Lydia, I’m not you and don’t pretend you can’t tell.” Erica’s getting pissed off now.
“Hm.” Lydia tilts her head, which Erica has learned is a dangerous pose. “Erica, what’s the difference between you and me, in terms of looks? No, stop that, I swear I’m not being mean. What do you think the difference is, seriously?”
“If you say ‘confidence’ I’m going to punch you in the tit,” Erica warns her sharply, and Allison sniggers.
“Charming. No. Two differences:” Lydia holds up two impeccably manicured fingers, “makeup, and a tailored wardrobe.”
“Bullshit.”
“I’ll prove it. Dare you to let me.” Lydia lifts her chin, that sharp, challenging posture makes Erica’s pulse pound a little bit. She swallows.
“Hey, don’t pressure her. She doesn’t have to do the whole 80s romcom makeover if she doesn’t want to. Erica, do you not want to? That’s fine.” Allison comes over to hover around Erica protectively, which is…sweet. Unexpected. It gives her a little shock of warmth, right through her chest.
“It’s not that I don’t want to.” In fact Erica spent years gorging herself on those ‘ugly girl gets a makeover and suddenly she was beautiful all along’ stories and fantasizing about the day that it would happen to her. But then she grew up and stayed ugly. Letdown, to say the least. “I just know she’s full of shit. Makeup and clothes don’t make me sexy or clear-skinned or…you know. You.” She waves a hand, vaguely, humiliated. Why did she say that? She was better when she acted like she didn’t know what she looked like, then she could fake being confident.
“Uh, excuse me, that’s exactly what makeup and clothes do?” Lydia rolls her eyes. “Sit down, shut up, and get ready to be amazed.”
“She doesn’t have to!”
“No, it’s okay. Let her try. I’m actually pretty excited for her to be wrong for once,” Erica says. She manages a grin to go with it. She’s having a crisis of childhood fantasy meeting reality, but at least getting to win an argument with Lydia will be some consolation.
Half an hour later Lydia puts the final touches of her makeup, drags her up out of the chair, and spins her around to face the mirror.
“Told you so.”
Erica stares. Her skin does look clear; if she peers close she can see the layer of foundation covering up the roughness, but it’s invisible from farther away. Her lips are bright red, the corners of her eyes sharp and slanted like she knows a secret. Lydia put something in her hair that smoothed it down from its usual frizz into something sleek and riotous. It’s still her face, still her chubby cheeks and brown eyes and high forehead, but she looks like one of the pretty girls. How the hell did Lydia do that?
“Babe, this is what makeup does,” Lydia explains gently, as if she pulled that thought out of Erica’s head.
“No one ever showed you how?” Allison asks.
“My dad has this rule. No makeup until sixteen. I’ll have to wash this off before I go home,” Erica explains faintly. She’s still staring at her face, and then she glances down a bit and stares some more. “Oh my god are those my boobs?!”
“Told you you had the wrong bra size,” Lydia says, smugly. “You can keep that dress, by the way.”
“It would be a crime not to with how you fill it out.” Allison Argent is looking appreciatively at Erica’s curves. What even is her life. She didn’t even know she had curves, but this dress has found them somehow, slides over the soft roundness of her breasts and hips and stomach in rolling waves of purple and black. She looks hot.
“Damn. Damn,” she says, and pops a hip just to see how it looks. Yeah. Yeah, she could get used to this.
“I’ve created a monster,” Lydia says, faux-regretful, and starts to put her makeup away.
“Jealous, Martin?” Erica coos. She purses her lips at Lydia in the mirror, kissy-face. Wow that’s red. She likes it.
“Proud,” Allison corrects with that sunshine smile.
The sleepovers become a regular thing, just like lunch did. Erica, who is not what one would call ‘experienced’ at this whole having friends business, wonders when the panic that they’ll stop liking—tolerating?—her will go away. She’s a little confused about how this whole thing snowballed. She started out with one clear goal, to get a break from the torment by using Allison and Lydia as human shields. Two months later she wants them to like her so badly. Finds herself talking louder and faster then she ever did before, uses their verbal quirks and flips her hair like Lydia does and plants her feet like Allison does. She’s alone so much less often, and sometimes she gets a little weirded out by it actually, how much less time she spends in silent conversation with herself. Is she still her? Is he deluding herself into thinking she could be anyone else?
The last question is answered pretty damn conclusively by Operation Bombshell (Erica named it). Her dad has not relaxed his rules regarding makeup and attire; Erica, channeling Lydia intentionally for once, points out that it’s kind of hypocritical for him to comment passive-aggressively about how she should take more care with her appearance and dress more like a girl but at the same time forbid her from wearing makeup and skirts above her knees. She gets grounded for three days. In retrospect, she doesn’t know what else she expected.
So subterfuge becomes the only recourse. On the appointed day Allison picks her up a little early, with just enough time to drive to Lydia’s house and get ready.
She hears the hush when she walks into the cafeteria and it is delicious. Erica learned long ago that the pressure of eyes on her is a psychical weight, and somatic sensation; she just never knew it could be exciting instead of horrifying. They’re looking at her a drooling. She loves it.
She saunters over to the lunch line, feels how the—very, very short—skirt stretches over her hips and thighs. Bends for her tray; hears an intake of breath at the cleavage it reveals. Turns and smiles, bright and red and predatory, and revels in the bewildered lust on the faces of her tormentors. She gets her tray, sways her way over to Lydia and Allison’s table, and hears a whisper behind her, “what the hell was that?”
That was me, bitches, Erica thinks. Me, and a giant, throbbing ‘fuck you’.
“You look great,” Allison tells her, like she didn’t say it fifteen times already this morning while Erica was freaking out. Allison has the patience of a saint.
“Everything you hoped?” Lydia asks. Erica searches for any patronizing in her tone and doesn’t hear anything. Maybe Lydia knows a bit about being so hot your smile is payback.
“And more,” Erica says, and bites in her apple with savage joy.
The day would have been perfect, except she gets home and all the stress and relief and exultation hit her all at once…at which point it promptly triggers a seizure. A really bad one, she realizes when she comes back, shaky and crying and gasping for air.
“Mija, did something happen?!” Erica wishes her mom wasn’t there. She loves her, but the guilt of worrying her doesn’t exactly help when she’s still trying to remember how to move her limbs.
“Just…overtired…” she pants, and lets herself thump her head back against the floor. Oh. Ow. Apparently she did that a lot already.
“You know you need to get proper sleep!”
Oh good, a lecture! That’s what she needs. Erica “yu-huhs” exhaustedly and tries to figure out if she’s going to puke. Signs are not promising.
“Come on baby, let’s put you to bed.” That she can get behind. Her mom is too tiny to carry her, so they kind of roll-stumble her over to her bedroom. But her mom makes her hot chocolate brings it to her in bed, so that’s okay.
On balance, still a pretty good day.
It’s several months into her friendship with Lydia and Allison that Erica almost fucks everything up. She doesn’t even know why she does it; they’re just sitting in Lydia’s room, idly thinking about streaming a movie, when it pops out of her mouth.
“Where were you in February?”
She regrets asking as soon as it comes out, because everyone seems to stop breathing. Lydia has frozen. Allison is so stiff she’s shaking a little. Erica has opened her mouth, ‘I’m sorry, pretend I never said that’ queuing up on her tongue, when Lydia speaks.
“The psych ward.” She puts the book she was holding down on the dresser a little too hard—Erica jumps and then curses herself for it. “I’m going to go downstairs and grab some snacks. Allison, take over.” Lydia is out the bedroom door in a flurry of hair and what looks like actual fear before Erica can say anything.
“I didn’t mean to—” she appeals to Allison, who shakes her head so sharply it cuts her off.
“We were going to tell you anyway.” Allison reaches out and tugs Erica down to sit next to her. She leaves her hand around Erica’s wrist after, which is kind of weird but already really nice and reassuring. “Lydia had a breakdown and had to be hospitalized for a while. If that freaks you out, or if you don’t think you can promise not to tell anyone about it and not to say anything horrible about it, that’s all I’m going to tell you.”
It does freak Erica out a little, if she’s being honest. Allison’s voice has this soft, serious tone that makes this seem like a really Adult Talk and Erica isn’t super equipped for those. She’s a lot better at the snappy comeback kind of conversation. She’s also never met anyone who had to go to a psych ward. She doesn’t know what that means or what she should think about it.
On the other hand, before her most people have never met anyone whose brain zaps them into convulsions if they don’t get enough sleep, so.
“People have said some pretty shitty stuff to me. I’ll keep my mouth shut if I think I’m in danger of doing it to Lydia,” is what she decides to say.
“You have to promise not to tell anyone. Not your parents, not your doctor, no one. Do you promise?”
“I promise.”
“Okay.” Allison’s hand tightens a little on Erica’s wrist, not hard enough to make her want her to let go. “Lydia has paranoid schizophrenia.”
Oh. Oh, damn, now Erica gets why she had to promise. She knows just enough to know, vaguely, that schizophrenia doesn’t actually mean you go around murdering people…but most people think it does. She’s a little scared. She decides to, like she promised, keep her mouth shut.
“From what she told me, she started…thinking there was someone out to get her. A horrible shadowy monster-creature that sometimes pretended to be different, normal-looking people, to catch her off guard.”
Jesus.
“She could hear him whispering to her all the time, saying scary, creepy things.”
Holy shit.
“And in class that day, she saw him come into the room, pick up a desk, and throw it at her. That’s why she started screaming for help, and all that.”
“I would have, too.” Erica hopes that’s okay to say. She didn’t know people’s brains could do that to them, just make horrible shit up to torture them with. That’s awful. Erica knows a bit about being betrayed by her body, but not by her mind.
“Right? So after that her mom took her to the ER, and I don’t know what happened next, but when they finally let me visit her she was, like, super drugged. They kept her there for a couple weeks, and then she came home. With the meds now she still sees creepy things sometimes and she still hears the voice, but it’s a lot less, and she doesn’t have those huge-scale hallucinations any more. So it’s pretty manageable she says.”
Ah, manageable. That’s the word they use about Erica’s epilepsy too.
“The meds are why she sleeps so much.” Erica has wondered, a bit. Lydia sleeps as much as Erica does, maybe more, and Erica has to to make sure she doesn’t seize. Is it weird she has some fellow feeling about that, now?
“Who else knows?” she asks, not sure why that’s what comes out of her mouth.
“Me. Her mom. NOT her dad. The nurse at school. Jackson.”
“Jackson?” They hate Jackson, Erica is very clear on this.
“Jackson said he couldn’t believe he’d slept with me and that now he had to get tested because what if it was contagious.”
Lydia is in the door way. Erica doesn’t know how long she’s been there. She’s definitely not carrying snacks; her arms are folded across her stomach, half defensive and half protective, and she’s watching Erica like she’s a bomb about to go off.
“…I’m going to cut his brake lines,” Erica says, which is not sensitive or well thought-out.
“Not now that you’ve made us accessories, you’re not.” Allison releases her wrist, and after a moment Erica knows why. She stands, a little wobbly because even her legs are full of feelings right now apparently, and goes over to Lydia in the doorway.
“Can I hug you?”
“Ugh. I guess, if you’re going to be sappy,” Lydia says, disgusted, and clings to Erica very hard when she wraps her arms around her. Allison squishes against her back a minute later and they stand in the doorway in a weird pile until Allison slowly starts waddling them towards the bed and plops down. Lydia ends up in Allison’s lap, and Erica ends up half on top of her and half on top of her discarded laptop.
“Ow,” she says, and they all disentangle. Allison wipes her eyes a little and Erica pretends not to notice.
“What do I need to know so I don’t fuck things up?” she asks when they’ve all had a bit of breathing space. Lydia glances at her, does a quick little flicker of a shrug that is trying to be casual but definitely isn’t, and starts listing on her fingers.
“Don’t worry about telling me if something’s real or not, that’s Allison’s job. Don’t bring it up if I don’t do it first. Don’t, like, freak out if I bring it up. Don’t tell me not to switch from medication to cognitive-behavioral treatment, my understanding of neuropsychology is definitely more advanced than yours and I’m infinitely more qualified to weigh the risks and advantages. Don’t fucking start doubting everything I say because I’m ~delusional~, it’s not cute.”
She bites the last word off viciously. Erica can kind of hear a bruise under there, the kind she’s familiar with herself, because she’s not fragile or erratic or weak and she's constantly wondering who sees her that way, who won't trust her because they think she can't handle it.
“Don’t call me a psycho, or crazy.”
“And don’t call people on the news who kill people crazy,” Allison puts in. When Erica glances at her she’s not even looking at her; she’s glaring at the door like she’s not even seeing it and her face is sharp, so sharp. “They’re murderers. It’s different.”
“I get it. I won’t,” Erica promises. Knowing what she does now, she’s kind of stunned that in the wake of all that they even bothered to let her sit at their table. With the stuff they were dealing with, how did they have the space to give a shit about her?
“You didn’t have to tell me. You didn’t have to do any of this. You could have just told me to fuck off,” she whispers.
“I’m okay with you knowing,” Lydia says, eyes steady.
“Are we gonna regret telling you?” Allison asks, and weirdly she’s not threatening. She’s actually kind of smiling.
“No.” Erica meant to think more before she responded, but it felt so important to get that out, get it clear. “No, I swear, you won’t.”
“Hm.”
Erica doesn’t even remotely see it coming when Allison leans over and presses a kiss to the side of her mouth, just barely on her cheek and not her lips.
“Am I gonna regret that?”
Eric stares. She knows she’s supposed to make words now but they’ve all left her, chased away by the smooth brush of Allison’s cheek against hers.
Lydia pecks her other cheek, quick and darting and playful.
“Come on Reyes. Dare you.”
Oh my god is this really happening right now?
“Shut up, you’re fucking with me,” she gets out, stunned.
“I mean, not yet.” Oh my god. Also, Allison is the dirty one, who’d have thought?
“Unless you don’t want to?” Lydia sits back a little, perfect hair and perfect mind and slightly smudged lipgloss.
“You don’t have to,” Allison echoes, so careful.
They’re the first real friends Erica has had in years, maybe ever. Probably a more cautious person would be scared to make them the first girlfriends too, but Erica’s always been kind of reckless.
“I’ll take that dare,” she says, and turns her head just enough to meet Allison's lips straight on this time.